Knowledge and Self Control - 24 Sept 2008

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. 2 Peter 1:5-7

Once we have faith and live a good life Peter suggests that we add knowledge.  In order to keep growing in our faith and in our good behaviour we obviously need to keep finding out more and more about that faith.  That will feed back into greater faith and more Christ-like deeds as we discover the history and the encouragement of scripture and listen to the experiences of others.  For Peter that literally meant going to see the people he needed to find out about and listening as they gave their testimony, something we perhaps do not do as often as we should (although a fellow contributor to these devotionals did just that in July and it was inspiring)

But today we are in the very fortunate position to have at our fingertips books and books crammed with the experiences of others, we have the internet which can take us anywhere in the world.  It was good to be able to read the live ‘postcards’ of visitors to Casa Reom almost as soon as those events occurred.  Peter would have been delighted to find himself in the company of so many witnesses.

Then Peter tells us to add in self control which makes me think that the goodness previously talked about was a lot less about stopping the bad stuff and more about adding in the good stuff.  The definition that I found for the Greek word Peter uses for self-control was ‘the virtue of one who masters his desires and passions, especially his sensual appetites’.

He seems to think that this virtue is to follow on from faith, goodness and knowledge.  I have spoken to a lot of Christians who secretly struggle with this particular virtue.  It is true that self-control takes a long time to grow and develop and sometimes perhaps we expect too much of it from others while secretly struggling with it ourselves.  Grace assists us in our struggle as we discover that our failures are not the end of our faith and that we can try again and again until we finally get it right.  This is where it is important for us to support and understand one another. 

The knowledge we share of our own struggles and successes builds up and encourages those coming along behind us so knowledge supports self-control.

Lord, please help me to hunger for more knowledge of you and enable me to practice self-control in my life. Amen